Insights focused course
This course explains the importance of being insights focused. It will help you to develop this key behaviour to achieve positive outcomes in your role
Core behaviours
Insights focused
Asking questions and evaluating evidence and ideas to create insight and understand the whole
As people professionals, we need to adopt a disciplined approach to understanding and diagnosing problems, and then use a range of evidence to develop people insights and solutions.
This behaviour draws on the key steps of evidence-based practice, including:
- asking questions
- acquiring evidence
- critically assessing evidence and then aggregating it to understand the whole issue and its wider implications.
Following these steps enables people professionals to gain insight into the nature and scale of challenges, how best to approach them, and, therefore, how to make more effective decisions overall.
Insights focused standards
Each standard progresses through four levels of impact. Which level do you most embody in your day-to-day work?
Foundation level
At this level you will:
- Ask questions to understand problems or issues
- Accurately retrieve and collate data to inform decisions
- Accurately analyse and evaluate evidence
- Contribute ideas using a reasoned approach
- Summarise data and evidence effectively
Associate level
At this level you will:
- Ask questions to explore issues and understand underlying causes
- Identify sources of evidence (eg internal data, professional opinion and external practice) and how best to acquire them
- Objectively evaluate evidence taking into account its quality
- Assess the quality of your own ideas and ask questions about others’ ideas and proposals
- Summarise evidence findings and identify key ideas, insights and connections
Chartered Member level
At this level you will:
- Take a disciplined and open-minded approach to understand and define organisation issues and their root causes
- Acquire and source multiple sources of evidence (eg internal and external professional expertise, research and stakeholder concerns and values) to test assumptions and ideas
- Objectively analyse and evaluate multiple sources of evidence to create insight, identifying sources of bias
- Collectively develop and improve the quality of ideas and proposals
- Assimilate evidence and ideas to identify themes and connections and gain insight on the whole issue and its wider implications
Chartered Fellow level
At this level you will:
- Take a systemic approach in understanding and framing emerging organisation and sector issues
- Oversee the acquisition and sourcing of internal and external evidence to inform people strategy
- Develop organisation capability to create evidence-based insight that will shape people and organisation strategy
- Build capability to develop new ideas and move organisational thinking forward
- Apply a systemic approach when bringing together people and business insight to create people and organisation value
Things to start thinking about
Use these prompts to reflect on your understanding of being Insights focused and uncover areas for future professional development.
- How did you gain a full and holistic understanding of the last issue you dealt with?
- How do you avoid following fads and fashions that may not work or may not be relevant to your context?
- What types of evidence informs your choices and decisions and how do you use them? In particular, do you use scientific research and organisational data?
- When was the last time you critically appraised the quality and relevance of evidence?
Take the course
Resources to guide your work, career planning and development, available on the CIPD's main site.
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Next: Situational decision-making
Making effective and pragmatic decisions or choices based on the specific situation or context